This morning I went to Brussels to go to a presentation at a customer of ours. I was a little early and I was waiting for Tom to pick me up at the central train station when I was approached by a slightly older man with white hair. He asked me directions to the building of the Red Cross. I didn’t know where it was, so I proposed him to go to a city map together and find out where he had to be. I noticed that every once in a while he brought his hand to his chest, a few inches above his heart, and he showed clear signs of tremendous pain coming from that area. I asked him if he was ok and then he told me the most impressive story I’ve ever heard. Normally he should be resting and ‘not moving’, because he got shot in Iraq, but he was in Brussels on a personal mission.
He said he’d been a soldier in Iraq, and showed me the metal tags he wore around his neck. He said he was a Stealth Fighter pilot, but was sent to Iraq to fly another type of plane because he had to deliver goods. Apparently, one way or the other, he got shot somewhere last week and was on his way home. The bullet normally would’ve hit him in the shoulder, but he was wearing a backpack and the bullet got diverted by an object he had put away in the small pockets attached to the girdle you wear the backpack with, so it ended up above his heart. He spoke South African and English and said he had a house in Cape Town, although he was in the US Air Force. He also said why he wanted to go to the building of the Red Cross. In Baghdad he and his buddies found a fifteen year old girl who spoke English fluently. She said she had been abducted by her father three years before and that she had been forced to stay in Iraq. They’ve turned over the girl to the Red Cross, and today she would be in Brussels. So, since he was here too he wanted to go visit her. One of the next few days the girl will be reunited with her mother.
The soldier also said he had to get to the Red Cross headquarters to pick up some money, so he could go home. Because the man obviously had a lot of pain (he showed me the wound, which was the first time ever I saw a bullet wound, and it looked really serious) I figured he wasn’t going to make it to the Red Cross building on foot, or that it would take him a really long time and a lot of pain. He had no money. So, I went to the cash machine and withdrew some money. Then I took him to a taxi, explained the driver where he had to take the man, paid in advance and went back to the meeting place where Tom in the meanwhile was steadily disturbing traffic. So, instead of donating to Greenpeace this year, this was my contribution to a better world. … And actually, I’m feeling quite satisfied. Good luck, stranger!
